Agricultural Mechanization and South-South Knowledge Exchange: What can Ghanaian and Nigerian policymakers learn from Bangladesh’s experience?

Bangladesh recently has experienced fast growth in agricultural mechanization. Nationally, the share of area cultivated by tractors and power tillers increased from 30 percent in the mid-1990s to 95 percent in 2015, with power tillers being used on three-quarters of the mechanically cultivated area. Moreover, agricultural machinery is not only used on large farms in Bangladesh, but has spread among smallholder farmers that own an average of 0.5 hectares (ha) of cropland. Supply of machinery for this rapid growth of mechanization has been based primarily on imports, as the capacity for local manufacturing of agricultural machinery is still limited.